I’m an Old Dog

I guess you could call me an old dog because I can’t seem to learn new tricks. I used to be pretty conversant with computers, but not any more.

When we decided (OK, TS&WGH decided, I concurred) that I needed my own web site, we discovered that my beloved 5 year old iMac was just a little too behind the times. We upgraded to a new one with a big screen, lots of memory, and OS X. Yikes, I can’t seem to get my head wrapped around this operating system. OS 9 organized things in heirarchal forms so if I wanted to find a photo of a baby quilt I made for a friend, I could go to the desktop, then into the folder of Kristin’s Projects, then to the quilt folder and into the Baby Quilts folder–easy.

We now have photos in iPhoto that were imported from the digital camera and from a backup CD, and it seems to have been put in these strangely numbered folders. Plus we have the stuff that was stored on the old iMac, but it’s still in it’s original folders. So. last night I put ALL the photos, organized by year, into the Photos folder on the desktop. I deleted the duplicates and triplicates and organized them so that I could find them later, i.e: photos from a trip to Schwetzingen in a folder marked Schwetzingen. After this 2 hour process I opened iPhotos, and lo and behold ALL the photos were gone! I tried to re-import them in their newly organized form, but the program wouldn’t recognize them. So, I had to spend another hour importing them from the backup CD so that iPhoto could make duplicates in it’s oddly numbered little folders in folders.

So I now have a folder of all our photos which I can manually search and open in Photoshop to edit PLUS I have duplicates of many of the photos which are embedded in iPhoto’s system and can be viewed in it’s slideshow. The worst part is that I wasted 3 hours trying to organize the photos the way I wanted, and ended up with it the way Apple wanted. (That seems too much like Microsoft to me.) I could have been quilting!

Just to compound things, our fire alarm decided that it needs a new lithium battery–at 4:30 in the afternoon. Too late to call the housing office to arrange for a service call to replace it (we live in government leased housing and all repairs go through their office). I called the service company and they can come in the morning, and hopefully, the housing office can fax the approval when they get in at oh-dark-thirty, but in the mean time, I have to sleep through the night with the alarm chirping at 2 minute intervals. Needless to say, jetlag woke me early and I have been unable to go back to sleep due to chirping. Why doesn’t anything break at 8:00 am?

The good news is that TS&WGH replaced my old Palm Pilot, inherited from my SIL, with a new one that will sync with the new iMac! Here’s me actually beaming the info from the old Palm to the new one. This I like.